Country Music

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BELFAST, 1976. WHILE OTHER STARS WERE BACKING OUT, CHARLEY PRIDE WALKED INTO A WAR ZONE, SOLD OUT THREE NIGHTS — AND BROKE DOWN SINGING TO A CITY THAT NEEDED TWO HOURS OF PEACE. “I got to thinking about the people coming to see me when there was all this trouble going on, and I got very emotional. And I don’t do fake tears.” In November 1976, Belfast was at war. Shootings of civilians and soldiers happened almost daily. The Miami Showband — one of Ireland’s most popular acts — had been massacred on a roadside by loyalist paramilitaries the year before. Johnny Cash had cancelled his Ulster Hall show in 1971. Days before Charley Pride’s scheduled appearance, the headlines read: “Singer Tammy Stands Down.” No one was coming to Belfast. Charley came. Dublin promoter Jim Aiken had flown to a rural Ohio concert and personally persuaded Charley not to skip Belfast on his UK tour. Charley said yes. He checked into the Europa Hotel — which boasted it was the most bombed hotel in Europe. He saw soldiers riding armored vehicles with guns pointed outward. He played three nights at the Ritz Cinema. Every show sold out. On the third night, he sat on a stool and sang “Crystal Chandeliers.” He thought about the people in the audience — Catholic and Protestant, sitting side by side — who had come out during a war just to hear him sing. He got emotional — and he meant it. The Belfast Telegraph ran a column the next day: “Thank you Charley Pride and the Pridesmen for giving me, and thousands like me, two hours of pure enjoyment, and the chance to forget for a while the worries and troubles of sad Belfast. Thanks for not backing out like so many others.” “Crystal Chandeliers” — a song that had never charted back in America — became an Irish unity anthem. Rod Stewart and the Rolling Stones followed Charley into Northern Ireland. Jim Aiken went on to book every major act that followed Charley through that door. A Black sharecropper’s son from Sledge, Mississippi, had walked into a war zone where no one else would go — and reminded a city tearing itself apart that music does not take sides.

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When Charley Pride Sang Through Belfast’s Fear in 1976 In November 1976, Belfast was a city living under strain. The…

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KENNY ROGERS HELPED BRING DOTTIE WEST BACK TO THE TOP. AFTER SHE WAS GONE, HE SAID SHE DESERVED THE COUNTRY MUSIC HALL OF FAME “MAYBE EVEN MORE THAN ME.” By the late 1970s, Dottie West’s biggest years seemed to be behind her. Then one afternoon, she was finishing a recording session when Kenny Rogers arrived early for his. They began harmonizing on “Every Time Two Fools Collide.” Their voices fit so naturally that the song became a duet—and reached No. 1 in 1978. Together, Kenny and Dottie won the CMA award for Vocal Duo of the Year twice. Their success helped introduce Dottie to a new generation and opened the way for the biggest solo hits of her career. Dottie died in 1991 without receiving country music’s highest honor. When Kenny was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2013, he used part of his own moment to speak for her. “I told the executives that Dottie deserves to be in here maybe even more than me,” he said. Kenny already had his place inside the Hall. He wanted to make sure the woman who had once stood beside him was not forgotten. In 2018, twenty-seven years after her death, Dottie West was finally inducted.

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Kenny Rogers Helped Bring Dottie West Back to the Top By the late 1970s, Dottie West had already lived through…

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BEFORE DOTTIE WEST BECAME THE FIRST WOMAN TO WIN A COUNTRY GRAMMY, SHE WAS A GIRL TRYING TO SURVIVE A FATHER WHO HURT HER — AND A CHILDHOOD SHE RARELY SPOKE ABOUT. Dottie was born Dorothy Marie Marsh, the oldest of ten children in a poor Tennessee family. While her mother worked to keep food on the table, Dottie helped care for the younger children. But the greatest danger was inside their own home. For years, her father sexually abused her. At 17, Dottie finally told her teachers. She later stood in court and testified against him. He was convicted and sentenced to 40 years in prison. Dottie could have allowed that childhood to decide the rest of her life. Instead, she worked her way through college, married steel guitarist Bill West, and spent years driving to Nashville on weekends, trying to convince someone to listen. Most doors stayed closed. Then Jim Reeves recorded one of her songs and introduced her to RCA producer Chet Atkins. In 1964, Dottie released “Here Comes My Baby,” a song she had helped write herself. It became a Top 10 country hit. In 1965, it made her the first female country artist ever to win a Grammy. The award honored her voice. But the greater victory belonged to the frightened Tennessee girl who had finally found the courage to use it.

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Dottie West: The Tennessee Girl Who Found Her Voice Before Dottie West became a country star, she was Dorothy Marie…

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VERN GOSDIN RECORDED “HANGIN’ ON” TWICE. THE FIRST TIME IT DIED AT NO. 37 AND HE WENT HOME TO SELL GLASS DOOR TO DOOR. NINE YEARS LATER HE CUT THE SAME SONG AGAIN, AND IT MADE HIM A STAR. It’s easy to be hard on him for those years. He had his shot in 1967 and he walked away from it. Traded a recording career for a mirror shop in Georgia. Real artists don’t quit, people say. Except look at what he’d already given up to get there. In 1964 the Byrds came calling — an invitation to join before they’d even signed with Columbia. The offer was for Vern. Not for his brother Rex. He turned it down and stayed with his brother. So the brothers made “Hangin’ On,” and it stalled, and nothing followed it, and by 1970 there was a wife and two kids and no money in music. He went to Atlanta and knocked on doors selling glassware. Then in 1976 he tried the same song one more time, with Emmylou Harris singing harmony beside him. It went higher than it ever had. Everything after — every hit, right through “Chiseled in Stone” — came out of that second try. Nine years in a glass shop, and the song that brought him back was called “Hangin’ On.” What are the odds?

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Vern Gosdin and the Song That Refused to Quit It is easy, years later, to look at Vern Gosdin’s story…

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THEY PLAYED 34 SONGS IN ONE NIGHT — AND THE FILM OF THAT NIGHT SAT UNRELEASED FOR 26 YEARS. On March 14, 1990, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson walked onto the stage at the Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, New York. It was their third arena in three nights — Landover on the 12th, Worcester on the 13th, Long Island on the 14th. Cameras were rolling the whole time, shooting on 35mm film. When the last song ended, the reels were boxed up and put into storage, where they stayed. They played 34 songs that night. It opened with “Highwayman.” Later came “Silver Stallion” and “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” Near the end, the four of them stood together for “Desperados Waiting for a Train,” a song about old men waiting on the same train. Cash was 58 that night, Waylon 52, Willie 56, Kris 53. The full show ran 2 hours and 39 minutes. It was not released in that complete form until 2016, when Columbia/Legacy scanned the original 35mm reels.

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They Played 34 Songs in One Night, and the Film Sat Unreleased for 26 Years On March 14, 1990, four…

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HE THREW THE SONG ON THE FLOOR AND TOLD HIS PRODUCER NOBODY WOULD BUY IT. IT WENT ON TO WIN EVERYTHING COUNTRY MUSIC HAD TO GIVE — AND THIRTY-THREE YEARS LATER IT CLOSED HIS OWN FUNERAL. In 1978, producer Billy Sherrill handed George Jones a song about a man who loved a woman until the day he died. Jones hated it. Too long. Too sad. He said nobody would ever play it. It took eighteen months to record three minutes of music. Jones kept forgetting the melody. Some nights he sang it to the tune of a Kris Kristofferson song instead. The spoken part came so hard it was finally taped a year and a half after the first verse. Sherrill built the record out of pieces. The day they finished, Jones looked him square in the eye and said: “Nobody will buy that morbid son of a bitch.” Then he walked out the studio door. It was released April 14, 1980. By July it was number one — his first solo number one in six years. Then the awards started, and they did not stop. A Grammy for Best Male Country Vocal Performance. CMA Single of the Year. CMA Song of the Year — and Song of the Year again the next year, the same record winning twice in a row. Single of the Year and Song of the Year from the Academy of Country Music too. CBS renewed the contract of a man they had nearly given up on. In 1992, country music voted it the greatest song the genre had ever produced. It still wins that vote today. The morbid son of a bitch nobody would buy. He was not a good husband. Everyone knew it, including him. That same February, five years after a bitter divorce, he was back in a studio with Tammy Wynette, singing a song she helped write about a house they filled with everything but love. He died April 26, 2013. May 2. Grand Ole Opry House. Alan Jackson closed the service with the song Jones had thrown away. On the last note he took off his hat and held it over his heart.

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The Song George Jones Swore Nobody Would Buy A song almost left on the studio floor In 1978, producer Billy…

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HE SANG ON NATIONAL TELEVISION ONE NIGHT IN NOVEMBER. A MONTH LATER, COVID TOOK HIM. HE ALREADY HAD HIS NEXT SHOW BOOKED. November 11, 2020. Nashville. Charley Pride, 86 years old, stood under the lights and sang. The room rose. They handed him a lifetime achievement award. Millions watched it live. He wasn’t saying goodbye. He had February on the calendar. Volunteer Jam, right there in Nashville. Another stage. Another crowd. He never got there. He tested negative before the show. Negative after. Then late November came, and the hospital. December 12. Dallas. Gone. Now think about what that room meant. A sharecropper’s son from Sledge, Mississippi. One of eleven children. He picked cotton. He pitched in the Negro American League and sang on the team bus between ballparks. When RCA put out his first record in 1966, they sent it to radio stations without his photograph. Let them hear the voice first. Let them love it before they found out who was singing. They did. More than fifty top-ten hits. Fifty-four years later, that same voice, in that same town, on live television in front of the whole country. They once hid his face to get him on the radio. He died with his face on every screen in America. And February still sitting there on the calendar.

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Charley Pride’s Final Bow: The Night He Sang in Nashville On November 11, 2020, Charley Pride stood under the lights…

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FOR YEARS, COUNTRY FANS WERE CERTAIN LORETTA LYNN AND CONWAY TWITTY WERE MORE THAN SINGING PARTNERS. THE TRUTH INVOLVED HER HUSBAND. Their first single together, “After the Fire Is Gone,” reached No. 1 in March 1971 and won both of them the first Grammy of their careers. It’s a song about two people who stopped finding love at home and found it in each other. Four more No. 1 duets followed, among them “Lead Me On” and “Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man,” and with every one of them the rumor got louder. Part of what made it land so hard was who was singing. This was the same Loretta who wrote “Fist City” in 1968 after learning what a woman back home was up to while she was recording in Nashville, and who had already told one rival she wasn’t woman enough to take her man. Nobody expected her to be delicate about marriage. “Everybody thought me and Conway had a thing going,” she said years later, and she called it about as far from the truth as anything could get. They were friends. And Doo, she said, loved Conway too — the one man in the whole music business her husband ever gave a dag-gone about.

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For Years, Fans Thought Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty Were More Than Singing Partners For a long time, country music…

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THEY CALLED HIM “THE VOICE.” WHEN HE DIED, THERE WAS NO BILLBOARD RECORD. NO VIRAL MOMENT. JUST SILENCE — AND THAT SAYS EVERYTHING ABOUT HOW NASHVILLE TREATS ITS OWN Vern Gosdin had a stroke in 1998. Then another. He kept writing. He kept singing. In December 2008, he released a 101-song box set — four decades of his life packed into four discs. He was renovating his tour bus for a summer festival when the last stroke hit. On April 28, 2009, he died in his sleep at a Nashville hospital. He was 74. George Strait said Gosdin helped him on his very first tour. Josh Turner called him an unofficial vocal coach. Emmylou Harris said they didn’t call him “The Voice” for nothing. Tammy Wynette once said he was the only singer who could hold a candle to George Jones. Then Nashville moved on. His fans started a petition to get him into the Country Music Hall of Fame. Sixteen years later, he’s still not in. Chiseled in Stone won CMA Song of the Year in 1989. The man who wrote it never got a Hall of Fame plaque. The guy who once joked he got ten hits out of his last divorce left behind 19 top-ten singles, a nickname that stuck, and a voice that every honky-tonk singer since has been quietly trying to match. Some legends get red Solo cups raised in their honor. Some just get forgotten by everyone except the people who actually listened. What’s your favorite Vern Gosdin song — or is this the first time you’ve heard his name?

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They Called Him “The Voice” Vern Gosdin never needed a billboard-sized comeback to matter. He did not build his reputation…

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THE SONG WAS ABOUT A WOMAN JUDGED FOR HER HEMLINE. THEN HER OWN LABEL PICKED OUT HERS. Jeanne Carolyn Stephenson was a secretary at a Nashville publishing house when Shelby Singleton heard her demo. The song was Tom T. Hall’s, already cut that year by another singer. She didn’t want it. It sold a million copies in ten days and made her the first woman to top both the country and pop charts — not matched until Dolly Parton, thirteen years later. She maintained the rest of her life that she was never paid what she was owed. A Grammy. CMA Single of the Year, 1968 — and on the night she won it, she had asked for a floor-length gown. Singleton had the designer cut it ten inches above the knee and told her to find silver boots. She said she was an artist. He told her she was not an artist. She was a commodity. The next year she got her own network television special. She became a born-again Christian in the seventies and let the hemline back down an inch at a time. She turned to gospel and published her account in 1981. She still sings the song. At seventy-seven she named what everyone had gotten wrong: she was never the mother in it. She was the little girl who brought the note home.

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The Song About Judgment, the Woman Who Sang It, and the Dress That Became Part of the Story Before Jeannie…

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